'Hey! Let's take all of our polling sites and consolidate them into a few large, super poll sites. Then we have thousands of voters vote in the same location on the same machines. We will save all kinds of money.' That's Denver Colorado and everything worked great until the machines began to fail and the process to get voters in and out slowed to a crawl. Result: Lines 4 blocks long. Day After Result: "Denver Auditor Dennis Gallagher today asked that Denver's two elected voting commissioners resign and that the mayor fire Clerk and Recorder Wayne Vaden as well as the entire senior staff of the election commission." / Over 18,000 under votes were recorded in the FL-13 CD. In a race that has less than 500 votes difference. Unfortunately most of the votes were cast on paperless ES&S voting machines. The software needs to be removed from the machines and closely inspected by experts. This race will not be decided for awhile....

**"Daily Voting News" is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in "Daily Voting News" may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**

John,..
Thanks for hunting this stuff down and keeping us posted. Someone mentioned yesterday,.. your like a busy little beaver toiling away in the background,.. but your one who receives few of the accolades that you deserve for your hard work.

There's something going on in OH-02, where Mean Jean Schmidt is 2,323 votes ahead in the House race. The Democrat, Dr. Victoria Wulsin, has not conceded and the race has not been declared. OH-02 includes Warren County - yes, that Warren County:

11/10/2004 Warren County officials, facing scrutiny of their decision to lock down the administration building on election night, say they were responding to a terrorist threat that ranked a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10.

The information, which Commissioner Pat South said was previously deemed confidential, is coming out a week after the public was barred from viewing the Warren County vote count. The Ohio Secretary of State's office doesn't know of any other county in the state to impose such a restriction.

County officials initially said they feared that having reporters and photographers present could interfere with the ballot counting. They subsequently cited homeland security concerns.

Now, they say an FBI agent told them that Warren County ranked a "10" on a terrorism scale. However, state and federal homeland security officials said Tuesday they were unaware of any specific threat against the county.

11/08/2006 The way Warren County is handling some of its absentee ballots is not unheard of, but is raising some eyebrows.

The county board of elections is waiting until Nov. 21 to count 2,000 to 3,000 absentee ballots.

Board Director Susan Johnson said it is standard procedure to hold off on counting the ballots because they were voted Friday or Saturday or were received at the board office by mail Monday or Tuesday. Ballots received that close to Election Day typically aren’t counted right away because there is no way to verify that the voters didn’t also vote at the polls, she said.

The Ohio Secretary of State’s [yep - Ken Blackwell] office said today that the procedure is not unheard of.

“I’ve heard of other boards doing what you’re describing and I’d have to check with our legal council to find out if that is in compliance with state regulations,” said spokesman James Lee. “It very well may be.”

But elections lawyer Cliff Arnebeck said waiting that long to count those absentee votes could be trouble.

“I don’t think that is reasonable,” he said. “Our concern is if you create that kind of delay you’re inviting potential manipulation. In absentee ballots, those are supposed to be counted the same time (as regular ballots.) A day would be reasonable to count the rest of them. But the idea of counting them on the same scale as provisional ballots is problematic.”

Provisional ballots – in which the person’s vote is questionable because of issues like arriving at the wrong polling place – do not have to be counted until Nov. 21.

Johnson said the county also received 1,850 provisional ballots.

The delay leaves several issues with margins fewer than 3,000 votes in limbo, including the Kings school levy which failed by 284 votes.

11/08/2006 Warren County officials had difficulty scanning in absentee and mailed-in ballots, Warren County Administrator David Gully said. Warren County received about 10,000 mail-in ballots this year, which are "way more" than past elections, Gully said. The scanning machines had trouble reading ballots that were crumpled or wrinkled in the mail-in process, Gully said. Although machines are designed to be fed several hundred ballots at a time, election workers here have to feed them individually, Gully said. In some cases, election workers transcribed votes to fresh ballots when individual ballots were not scanning correctly. Gully did not know how many had to be transcribed. Two people scanned ballots into machines while two women were handed ballots to be transcribed. Barbara Sizemore, Warren County Board of Elections board member, said there is one Republican and one Democrat. One person calls the votes aloud, the other marks it. Sizemore said they were being monitored.

PeterB discusses the undervote in the 13th Florida Congressional district when comparing the nearly 88,000 that voted for governor in a county in that district vs. the 76,500 that voted in the congressional race in that same county. That would be an undervote of about 11,500 in that county alone. Hope that helps if you are still perplexed.

Actually I have been worried since reading something months ago regarding Diebold & undervotes. I was afraid if I didn't mark a vote for every race (i.e. in the case of a Repub. candidate running unopposed I was going to not vote for him/her in a statement of my disgust with the current admin) my entire ballot would be "tossed." Hehe - of course this is all kinda silly to worry about knowing what WE know. But ... I brought it up with an Election Supervisor at my district and she nearly had a fit. So I promised I would get the answer and let her know what I found out.

In the meantime I did locate something that might be what confused me at the time ... I was probably rushing & reading too much at once as usual.

In Georgia's 2004 General Election, Diebold's DREs are reported to have performed flawlessly; only the paper absentee ballots produced ANY undervotes. In precinct after precinct, the computers registered zero undervotes. That's what the DRE end of day printouts tell us. Without fail, in every race, in every precinct, the Election Total Reports tell us not a single undervote was recorded on DREs.

So - In my haste I think I translated that to mean my vote wouldn't register if it was an undervote.

What I think it means is that Diebold redefined the term UNDERVOTE. They deviated from the standard term in order to conceal their true undervote rate so they can say their undervote is LOW --- a marketing scheme.

If you're interested you can read more about that here
(look for entry #3)

How do we get summaries of reported voting irregularities for our states FAST? Our TN media is (finally) all over the story of voting problems here, but I can't seem to be able to get any info on whether these problems have been reported to any of the toll-free hotlines set up for this purpose. Your help, as always, would be appreiciated. Bernie Ellis

Bernie,
You can send them to the VotersUnite data bank of problems taken from the media. We are still wading through articles and getting data posted.
I've also sent your request to the EIRS and other groups who fielded calls to help them to expedite getting their reports so they can be used by the public.

Did Ohio's Ken Blackwell share real-time election results with the RNC/KKKarl Rove,.. and this enabled them to determine how much the election result had to be tampered/manipulated/rigged during 2004 election to return GWB to the White House ?